"What do you mean they've moved the phone box ?"

You do expect some changes when you've been gone for twenty-three years, but moving the phone box a couple of hundred yards down the road really seemed like sacrilege. How many times had I walked over from the campsite to phone home and let everyone know that we were all still alive? How often had we crammed six people into that small red box, to shelter from the pouring rain that always started right after we put down the receiver? That phone box was an icon. But I suppose it honestly does make more sense to put the only phone beside the youth hostel, rather than beside the farmhouse that always seemed totally deserted.

It has been more than twenty years since I camped in Glen Brittle with St. Andrews University Mountaineering Club. That end of spring term meet was an annual celebration after final exams. We had celebrated my twenty-first birthday right there in the campground; somehow I don't remember too many of the details. But, "where's that bottle of.....'CRASH' " still brings back vivid memories of someone falling flat over the club tent - and it didn't even have guy lines to trap the unwary. We called it the "Nalley" because it was shaped like an alley and held "n" people, where n is the traditional large whole number, beloved of mathematicians.

Now I'm back for a quick reunion visit with my climbing partner Andrew. He and his family have conveniently settled in Inverness, albeit with several year long detours to Finland, Afghanistan and Holland. I have lived in the northern California beach paradise of Santa Cruz (earthquakes excluded), for the last twenty-three years, so we've moved apart in some ways.

I have developed a fondness for the great Alaskan wilderness, just a hop, skip and jump up the west coast from Santa Cruz ( or at most a short flight on the exquisite Alaska Airlines ). This story was written as I sat on a curving mussel bar below McBryde Glacier, in Glacier Bay National Park. The others in my group were off watching for chunks of ice calving from the glacier face into the lagoon. I had stayed behind to ferry the six double kayaks up the channel on the incoming tide. Otherwise there was a nasty choice between the quarter mile walk across (or rather through...) the glacial silt, at low tide, or playing dodgem kayaks with the icebergs barreling out of the channel from the lagoon.

Andrew and I thought a short reunion on the Skye ridge would be fun - a reality check on the changes in the last few years. Some things change in twenty-three years and some things don't. The phone box has changed. The Glen Brittle road game has not, despite a few largely cosmetic changes to the road itself: the rules of play still seem to be approximately: 10 points if the other car has to slow down, 50 points if they have to reverse and 500 points if they go into the ditch. Of course, even in its original incarnation, the game felt much safer than the more recent time that I was driven down to Glen Brittle by an American friend who insisted on trying to drive on the left side of the single track road.

So how about the campsite itself? The bathrooms have actually improved - but then that wouldn't be hard. However, the wee footbridge still threatens to slide the unwary reveler into the burn on a dark and stormy night. The campsite is remarkably unchanged even though the musical wake-up call of "Campsite fees, please" has been replaced by a boring, pay in advance system. Most of the tents have changed, but ours hasn't. The old Black's "Good Companion" stands out like a sore orange thumb, and is somewhat less than weather proof. But it does have character entirely missing from the uniform advance of the nylon domes. On the other hand, I certainly wouldn't want to take it with me to Alaska.

The journey to the west from Inverness had already shown some interesting changes. The imminent opening of the bridge seemed like a monumentally bad idea - at least from the folk song point of view. "Take the boat over to Skye" and "If you've never been kissed/pissed2 in that isle of the mist" seems to lose all of its romance if you can just drive over a bridge to get there. I suppose the National Trust took that important idea into account in its deliberations on the project!

The Sligachan Hotel had changed enormously for the better. The bar was better, the beer was better, the food was better and the staff actually appeared to be pleased to serve climbers. Perhaps the large campsite is taking it a little too far though.

So how about the ridge itself? Has the climbing changed? A lot of the answer to that has to lie in your perspective. The first time I saw them as a teenager, the cliffs of Coire Lagan looked so enormous, and the bogs on the Loch Coruisk path felt interminable. But now I've climbed in Yosemite Valley with its three thousand foot sweeps of unbroken granite and I've slogged over the tussocks of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge's north slope. And I've spent a lot of time paddling beneath the tidewater glaciers of Southeast Alaska - or just sitting writing stories beside them. So things look different to me.

Andrew had put it another way one year when we were debating whether I could live with a girlfriend in Scotland, the same way I had in California. It would have been unthinkable when I left Scotland in the sixties. " You could do it now - Scotland may not have changed much, but you have", was Andrew's verdict. It's all in your viewpoint.

So, back on the ridge, there do seem to be more people scurrying along the rock than I remember. The advent of guided parties produces some entertaining moments: there are, count them, the eight people in identical blue crash hats lined up at the foot of the In Pin. And there is that chance encounter with Andrew's neighbour from Inverness, as we round a less well remembered pinnacle. We are trying to decide which way to go when two tentative figures appear from the opposite direction. When we ask them which way they have come they respond "Oh, we don't know anything - you'll have to ask our guide on the end of the rope" And then the neighbour appears. It does make for a good conversation until the clients start getting restless.

Strangely, route finding needs more effort than it used to - I'm sure I never used to abseil going off Sgurr Alasdair in that direction! And my GPS receiver insists that walking over the cliff is the correct way to go, and offers to record how fast I'm moving on the long way down. But the rays of evening light from Gars-bheinn are as beautiful as ever. And the islands still float on a magical mystery carpet. My knees, however, just aren't what they used to be. After that descent to the Loch Coruisk path the boggy stretches are quite a struggle in the gathering gloom. It's really hard to negotiate all those tussocks without bending my left knee. In fact, they really are comparable to those Alaskan North Slope tussocks that only a caribou can cross with any semblance of elegance. But at least it isn't as bad as that dreadful night when we carried a stretcher across those same tussocks in the pouring rain, descending from the ridge above Coir a' Grunndha. The bad news then was a rock-fall on White Slab and a badly broken ankle. But the good news is that, thanks to the skill of the surgeon at Raigmore, the victim can still walk today, and lives happily in Oregon.

And of course, the final comparison is the weather. It has clearly changed for the worse - perhaps we can blame it on global warming. I remember the good old days of lying in the morning sun in the campsite before wandering up to Coire Lagan for an afternoon of climbing. The top of the Cioch had always seemed like it would be a grand spot for a "bring your own rope" party. (And there weren't any midges in those days either. If you believe that statement, I have a bridge for sale in Arizona.....). This year we spent four days in Skye and three days prior to that, waiting for clear weather in Inverness. All told there has only been one dry spell of twelve hours during my week's visit. So we only did half the ridge. But it was still very satisfying.

To add final insult to injury though, everyone I met in Scotland a year later apologized for the bad weather that summer and reminisced about how wonderful the weather had been the previous summer.

It's amazing what just one year will do to the memory cells, let alone twenty-three.... Were there really maids in Glen Brittle?
 
 

430 Hampstead Way

Santa Cruz, CA 95062

December 1996